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15 Team Icebreakers For Virtual Meetings

They allow employees to collaborate across borders without having to be present at the same location. To learn more about leading a remote team, read our Q and As from remote company leaders. These pictures will give you a quick peek into where and how people work by helping you see their life in real time.

You can use the ones listed above anytime to have people connect and share. There are many online team-building platforms for remote teams. Plus, many team-oriented and collaboration companies offer ice-breaking questions, games, and activities that you can use for your virtual meetings. That’s why we’ve put together the go-to guide to fun icebreaker games that you need to start your virtual meetings off right. We’ve included icebreakers you can use with small groups of remote employees, ones for total strangers, and everything in between. While we all know that it’s important to build a strong culture within a team, this can sometimes be more difficult in staff with remote employees.

How Can Virtual Ice Breaker Questions Help Remote Teams?

Then, drive a discussion around how people voted and why. Everyone can contribute and so you’ll take an instant pulse check on how everyone is feeling before the meeting. Ask your team how they are in a different way this time – try it with a poll. Simply choose your favorite beverage, add your name to it to identify yourself, and let the conversation flow. Ask everyone to snap a photo, or upload one from their computer and add it to the board and then let everyone share a story.

  • Virtual or not, a team’s trust relies on the quality of communication!
  • Undoubtedly, this is a powerful way to connect with others, even if the audience is global or diverse.
  • Post these on your intranet and let your employees engage in a discussion about why they are so bad.
  • Using a virtual workplace platform, team members get paired with a colleague on a video call within a limited amount of time.
  • This icebreaker is highly adaptable to almost any type of content and works like a charm with a global audience.
  • These exercises are suitable at the beginning of a virtual meeting, and when welcoming new participants.

With COVID-19 still a concern, more people are ordering online than ever before. Not all of us have the amazing guitar talent some were blessed with, but we all love https://remotemode.net/ to pretend. Hosting a virtual air guitar competition evens the playing field. This can mean incorporating polls, breakout rooms, and Q&A sessions into the agenda.

How To Make Your Virtual Meeting Icebreakers More Effective

Want to check in with your group but don’t want to get caught up in a time-consuming game? Draw Your Mood is a unique, creative way of gauging employee moods before a virtual meeting. In this fun icebreaker game, your team will need to read the lips of their teammates and guess the phrase. Me Too is on the top list of icebreaker ideas for Zoom meetings.

  • If freshman nerves are still running high at your company, you can opt to make this question anonymous.
  • Make it a race to see who can complete the best drawing in two minutes, or simply allow five minutes of free scribble time while everyone gets settled.
  • Virtual ice breaker questions are an excellent way of breaking down strict or formal business barriers to boost team bonding for good rapport and productivity.

This one involves everyone sharing a little known fact and others guessing which fact belongs to which team member. And while you’re at it, schedule a tour to experience first-hand how the boutique work environments at Bond Collective can benefit your business. You want them focused on the game you’re playing — and on each other — not on the unmade bed behind you.

Short Virtual Ice Breakers

Give your participants a selection of funny images or GIFs and get them to vote on which one most accurately describes what they’re feeling right now. Create a bunch of activities or questions for your team and assign them to a spinning wheel. Simply spin the wheel for each team member and get them to perform the activity or answer the question that the wheel lands on.

icebreakers for virtual meetings

It looks like Zoom meetings, Zoom icebreakers, and online conference calls are here to stay. Lucidspark is a virtual whiteboard that helps you and your team collaborate to bring the best ideas to light. It comes packed with all of the sticky notes, freehand drawing tools, and infinite canvas space you need to capture that next big idea. Think of it like a sandbox where your team can bounce ideas around and innovate together in real time. There are many platforms and tools that make it easy to bring your team together. But the important thing is to do what makes your team feel excited and engaged.

Daily Team

In this one, you can ask each member of the team what they would take to a desert island. Afterwards, everyone anonymously votes for their favourite answer.

  • Plus, many team-oriented and collaboration companies offer ice-breaking questions, games, and activities that you can use for your virtual meetings.
  • There are plenty of escape room platforms out there, for example, Escape Live.
  • With COVID-19 still a concern, more people are ordering online than ever before.
  • Because social connection is important to your bottom line.
  • Unleash the fun of being on a team with these ice breakers.

Nothing helps foster this collaborative team spirit like a good meeting icebreaker. Taking a few minutes for everyone to learn about each other—or even just be silly—can work wonders on the mood of the meeting participants. It allows them to loosen up and bring more of themselves to their work and increases the likelihood that they’ll be engaged and excited about the rest of the meeting agenda. This icebreaker is an excellent way to take the pulse of your team and promote participation. There are several ways to check your team´s overall mood.

Q: What Are The Benefits Of Starting A Zoom Meeting With An Icebreaker?

You’ve probably seen companies using Caption This to encourage their audience to interact with their content. Well, it also works brilliantly as a fun virtual icebreaker.

icebreakers for virtual meetings

Take a synchronized virtual coffee break with your colleague and try the virtual scavenger hunt. Two or three individuals can also play against each other simultaneously. Or, take it up a notch and create small teams to battle against each other.

Fun Virtual Team Building Activities, Games, & Ideas To Boost Remote Employee Morale In Online Teams For 2022

Here is our list of the best virtual team icebreakers for work. This icebreaker presents a great opportunity for employees to discuss their hobbies or lives outside of work. By introducing a show and tell icebreaker, you allow your team to express something funny, exciting or cool that they have been thinking about in their free time. It could be their new pet, a trophy from a recent sports win, their new favourite drink or even a new notepad. With engagement rates in flux, it’s more important than ever to strengthen connections with our virtual teams. With employees working remotely, sometimes accomplishments are overlooked. When companies use peer recognition, 57% have seen increased employee engagement.

  • B2B marketers say that interaction at virtual events is their biggest challenge.
  • In breakout groups, the reader will ask the writer for a word that’s an adjective, noun, or adverb, depending on what the type of blank space is.
  • Hire someone professional and ship a couple of bottles of champagne to your audience prior to the virtual event.
  • In that context, ice breakers for virtual meetings can help get the conversation started and get everyone more comfortable, excited, and engaged right from the start.
  • Personally, if I could go 3 minutes without searching for a volleyball to paint a face on, I’d basically consider myself Bear Grylls.

Brief the participants on the game basics to ensure that every player understands how to play. For large teams, you can split participants into smaller groups of about five members. These smaller teams may use a charades generator for prompts, and work together to figure out the charade phrases. These cool questions will have everyone traveling in a time machine. The gamification and achievement badges are also a fun way to motivate your employees to participate.

First Light is a quick virtual icebreaker that you can include in any meeting to get everyone thinking, talking, and working together. Virtual icebreakers don’t have to be complicated to be effective. Just asking questions is sometimes enough to forge real bonds between coworkers. Instead of meeting one another in a conference room, phone calls, video chats and instant messaging are the key ways to communicate and collaborate.

2 Truths And A Lie

Categorize these recipes by geographical location and ask your employees to share a fact or two either about the recipe or the area they grew up. You could also ask your employees to share a short story via video about their childhood or a favorite memory from their past. Normalize the chaos by encouraging photos of your team’s real-life work spaces. This will help your employees feel supported and connected as a team.

Get To Know Your Icebreaker Template

Circle back to attendees who manage to answer with a straight face and see if you can wear them down until just one person is left. Alternatively, declare anyone left after three rounds a winner! You can also replace “my smelly boot” with an office in-joke, like “call the copier repair service” or “you’re on mute”. Try asking yes/no or this/that questions, using thumbs icebreakers for virtual meetings up/down or right/left hands to share answers. Some of these questions are silly and some are a little more profound. It’s up to you which question you choose to ask depending on the mood you’re trying to create. An article published in the Harvard Business Review found that laughing in the office lightens the mental load and induces physical changes in your body.

Author

Allan Tsao